Gil Shwed

Early life and background

Gil Shwed was born in Jerusalem in 1968 and started writing code at thirteen. He studied computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but the more formative part of his training came during military service in Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces' signals-intelligence unit.

Unit 8200 draws in many of the country's most technically capable young people and gives them serious security and intelligence responsibilities early. Its alumni have founded a large share of Israel's technology companies, particularly in security. For Shwed, the unit's core concern, keeping hostile actors out of networks, became the problem he would build a career around.

Building Check Point

In 1993 Shwed invented and patented a technique called stateful inspection. Earlier network filters judged each data packet on its own, with no memory of the traffic around it. Stateful inspection tracked the condition of each connection, so a packet could be assessed as part of an ongoing exchange. That made it far better at separating legitimate traffic from intrusions, and it became the basis of the modern firewall.

That same year he co-founded Check Point Software Technologies with Shlomo Kramer and Marius Nacht. The company released FireWall-1 in 1994, and Shwed became chief executive. The commercial internet was about to grow rapidly, and Check Point had a defining product for the security need that growth would create. It listed on the Nasdaq and became one of the cornerstone businesses of Israel's technology sector.

Shwed led the company as CEO from 1994 to 2024, among the longest tenures of any Nasdaq-listed chief executive, before becoming Executive Chairman. His successor, Nadav Zafrir, is a former commander of Unit 8200. Shwed holds roughly 19.1% of Check Point, and his net worth was estimated at about $4.38 billion in 2024.